1989

by Peter Millar

  While Honecker feted his brother communists with a formal dinner on a scale none of their populations could ever enjoy, on the streets of East Berlin there were at first only flickering signs of resentment. Literally flickering: candles impaled on railings outside an old redbrick Lutheran church in Prenzlauer Berg, just a few streets from Metzer Eck. The Swords to Ploughshares campaign had faded from visibility but the loose bond between the church and disaffected youth had remained. The Gethsemane Church had opened its doors as a venue for peaceful demonstrations of solidarity for those imprisoned after the weekly marches in Leipzig.

  The crowd inside was mostly the usual ragtag band of East Berlin’s disenchanted young people, the ones who had outgrown or deliberately rejected the conformity of the FDJ. Their uniforms were spiky punk hairdos and denims bought with saved-up D-Marks at the hard currency shops. Their politics were those of disaffection, not revolution. Many of them sat on the floor, hand-rolling cigarettes, dozens hung leaning over the upstairs balconies. This was a congregation born out of the church’s support for the dissident ‘peaceniks’. But among them there were a growing number of more respectable ‘middle class’ kids into whose lives the unrest of the summer had already blown a chill wind.

  One by one eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds came up to the pulpit to give a personal ‘testimony’. One young girl with long dark hair looked teary-eyed at the crowd and said simply, ‘Pray for my boyfriend, in jail since July.’ After each testimony the church choir sang a brief, ‘Kyrie Eleison’: ‘Lord have mercy.’ They were not expecting much mercy from the state. That much was made clear by the attitude of the watchers outside, tough men in plain clothes that were in themselves as good as a uniform: hooded anoraks and dark, neatly-pressed trousers.

  To me, of course, it was all good ‘colour’. I made notes on the folded sheets of A4 paper that too often took the place of a proper notebook. In my head I had already composed the guts of my story for the next day’s paper: it was to be a neat counterpoint to the pompous official celebration set against these scenes of quiet angry repression rounded off with the curious codicil that these days it was the presence of a Soviet leader that gave a glimmer of hope to Germans on the wrong side of the Berlin Wall. As it was a Saturday, time was running out fast for a Sunday newspaper man; I would have to get it across to the foreign desk by four p.m. at the latest to make the paper which would be running off the printing presses by six thirty p.m. I was hoping to get the lead story position on one of the foreign pages. If I was lucky, I might even get a line or two on the front, cross-referring to the inside piece, but with a big row brewing about MPs not having to pay the controversial poll tax on their second homes, and interest rates rising to fifteen per cent threatening to put the British economy into recession, frankly I doubted it.

  All I needed for the finishing touches was to dash down to the official press centre to catch a briefing by Gorbachev’s official spokesman Gennady Gerasimov. On the way, however, my hired car broke down. For no obvious reason, it just lost power. Whether it was a terminal transmission problem or maybe – not impossibly – I just ran out of petrol I shall never know. Right there and then, it didn’t matter. The story came first. I coasted to the side of the road, got out and made it the rest of the way on foot. Gerasimov’s briefing made little difference to the story I bashed out on my faithful Tandy 200, and sent down the line to London.

  On the way back to retrieve my car I noticed several hundred young East Berliners shouting the by now familiar ‘Gor-by, Gor-by’ outside the Palace of the Republic where the Warsaw Pact leaders were saying their goodbyes. To all extents and purposes they were still leaders of one of the world’s most powerful military and political alliances, celebrating the anniversary of one of their most important keystone members. It was unimaginable that in a year’s time that keystone would be gone, the German Democratic Republic would no longer exist, the pact itself would be in its death throes, the Soviet Union on the verge of disintegration, and one of them, Nicolae Ceausescu, long dead, overthrown and executed by his own people just ten weeks after that October meeting.

  It was unimaginable to me too. At that precise moment I was more concerned about the whereabouts of my rented Beamer. It was gone. There, at the bottom of Prenzlauer Allee, where I had left it, illegally parked but not dangerously so, by the side of the kerb on a main road, there was a glaring absence of BMW. I was dismayed but not wholly surprised. There was the possibility, of course, that it had been stolen. A new BMW would have been worth a large fortune in anybody’s money in East Germany. But probably more money than possessed by anyone who didn’t already have access to the West and therefore the possibility of buying one over there cheaper. Also crime rates in the GDR were low – in countries with a large number of political prisoners, there are often fewer ‘ordinary’ offenders – and it would have been nigh-on impossible for even most inspired crooks to get hold of a replacement key.

  The more likely – even obvious – answer was that it had been towed away by the police. Particularly given the security paranoia surrounding the ‘birthday party’. I decided to go and ask them. The nearest police station was Berlin’s most famous – or infamous – Polizeirevier Berlin Mitte. Infamous, because it had once been the headquarters of the Gestapo. Not the actual building of course. Not much around there had survived the war intact. But it was the same site. And the name still had resonance. The East German ‘People’s Police’ hadn’t gone out of their way to dent that. Not least in the less than welcoming presence the entrance offered to the public: a closed and apparently locked door of ribbed steel.

  I had been banging on it for several minutes before a buzzer sounded, it opened and an unseen voice ordered me in to an even less welcoming sight: a corridor sealed off with an iron-barred gate. The token human presence was a harassed and angry-looking policemen staring at me from behind a grille to the left. ‘What do you want? How dare you make a noise here.’ I explained that my car was missing and that I feared it had been towed away and that coming to report it to the police didn’t seem that unreasonable. Which just went to show how much of everyday life in the ‘people’s republic’ I had forgotten. He glared at me as if I was an idiot – and in retrospect he might have had a point – said bluntly that no, he had not the faintest idea – or interest – where my car might be. My very presence there, he indicated clearly, after demanding and inspecting my identity papers, was precisely the sort of ‘provocation’ to be expected from the malicious Western press, ‘especially under the circumstances’.

  I was about to ask him which particular circumstances he had in mind, when all of a sudden I came face to face with them: marching up in double file to the other side of the iron-barred gate in front of me was a small army of baton-wielding Bereitschaftspolizei, the People’s Police paramilitary wing about to indulge in some less than popular policing. I took my cue and retreated through the steel door just as the iron-barred gate opened and they followed me.

  Out on the wide pavements the crowds shouting ‘Gor-by, Gor-by’ were spilling into the centre of the road. The Bereitschaftspolizei decided to help them on their way, spreading into broad lines in an attempt to push them across the road and coral them, a technique known as einkesseln, (in a Kessel is how Germans described the situation of their trapped army at Stalingrad). Over-literally translated into English as ‘kettling’ it has since been adopted over-enthusiastically by London’s Metropolitan Police, even if they don’t boast about where they got the idea.

  It didn’t work. For one thing the crowd was too large and too fluid, this was not an organised demonstration, just a huge bunch of people who had coalesced rather than gathered. The few hundred who had been milling around earlier had now swollen to several thousand and more were joining them by the minute. The police’s kettling attempt was not helped by the vindictive and highly aggressive policy of their plainclothes cousins: snatch squads of young men in imitation leather coats with scarves around their mouths – Stasi shock troop
s – had begun dashing into the crowd to pick up anyone they suspected might be a ‘ringleader’. By now I had become part of the crowd, close enough to one Stasi snatch to see a teenage girl throw herself at the gang trying to drag her boyfriend away. Within seconds one of them had produced an evil-looking sprung steel baton and used it whip-like to cut her legs from beneath her.

  As the police piled forwards, the crowd pulled back, onto the tram lines now, as suddenly a familiar shrill bell split the night: a tram was coming. For a few tense moments both police and protesters edged back as the tram forced its way through the melee. Then with the tram still moving, the police surged forward again. The tram stopped dead. One young girl, little more than a child, was all of a sudden lifted up and passed through an open tram window to the relative safety inside. The tram driver rang his bell again and as the crowd in his path parted he accelerated away. By now we were right across the road from Alexanderplatz, at the foot of the long broad streets that led uphill to Prenzlauer Berg. And still the crowd kept somehow growing. I estimated there were maybe as many as 10,000 East Berliners now on the streets confronting their ‘own’ police. The last time such a thing had happened had been during a short-lived workers’ strike in June 1953, following the death of Stalin. They had been crushed by Soviet tanks. Now once again on this cold autumn night a fresh breath of springtime seemed too much to hope for. The tanks were still not far away. East Berlin was ringed by Soviet bases.

  As the crowds flowed up the hill, the police followed. From time to time the Stasi snatch squads still made their rapid incursions. But they were less confident now. Dilapidated Prenzlauer Berg was home ground for most of the crowd. They melted into the ill-lit side streets and re-emerged on main streets a block further on. The police formed lines across the streets to follow us, but a Kessel was harder to create in a network of back streets with the courtyards and stairwells of the six-storey ‘rental barracks’ to retreat into. The kettle leaked. In one interlude of pure farce, the police charged from both ends of a street, but the demonstrators disappeared into doorways to scuttle through backyards and reappear, hooting with laughter behind the two lines of scowling People’s Police left facing each other with raised truncheons.

  It was like a scene from Les Misérables: a red banner was snatched from a lamp post and waved against the police: ‘We are the people,’ they chanted. And then, to rub it in they sang – we sang – that great revolutionary hymn, the ‘Internationale’, the communist anthem flung in the communists’ faces. We sang? What about the ‘Prime Directive’, I hear you say! To hell with the ‘Prime Directive’, I was working for a paper now, not a neutral news agency. Making a difference was part of the plot. Anyhow, this was no ‘strange new world’, this was home, or as good as. This was my struggle too. Wir sind das Volk, we chanted. We are the people. And I meant it as much as any of them.

  As we swarmed down the side streets, like an army of ants amidst a canyon of tenement buildings, illuminated only by lights turned on in upper-floor windows, there was a sudden outbreak of laughter, cheering and police confusion. From the sixth-floor flats old ladies had opened their windows and were dropping precious eggs onto the heads of the police. As ever I cursed myself for not having a proper notebook and scrawled semi-legible notes on the only piece of paper I could find (which in stark contrast to the popular revolution going on around me, turned out to be an old American Express statement).

  As the ebb and flow of people and police moved deeper into the heart of Prenzlauer Berg I let myself slip into a doorway for a moment, out of the main body of protesters. Metzer Eck was only a street away. It was not that I desperately needed a beer – although I did – it was that I desperately needed that implement that all those years ago Terry Williams had advised me to tell the interviewers at Reuters would be the first thing on my mind in a crisis: a telephone. It was nearly seven p.m., just six p.m. in London, and already too late for the first edition of The Sunday Times, but the colour I had gleaned from the streets would freshen up the story I had already filed. Especially the eggs. They would love the eggs. I was still pushing for a place on the front page. And the way things were going, it was looking more likely every moment. If only I’d known.

  In Metzer Eck, however, it was business as normal. Horst was behind the bar and the Stammtisch was full of the usual gang: Manne, Busch and Alex deep as ever in joke-swapping political repartee. They had heard the noise outside but looked out too late. The revolution was passing them by. Like many others that night, they assumed it was a flash in the pan, a youthful exuberance that would have vanished by the morning. They were surprised to hear that the marchers were still assembled in a body only a few streets away. Alex handed me the phone, in itself a sign of how things were changing: a few years earlier I would not have risked compromising him by filing a report to a British newspaper over an East German citizen’s phone line. But we both knew that right now the Stasi had other priorities. Squinting at my scribbled notes I gabbled the additions to my story to the deputy foreign editor in London. I was right about the eggs. He loved them.

  Then I downed the beer Horst had pushed into my hand and said I would be back soon. I thought I would be. Surely it was all over bar the shouting, and even I thought there would not be much more of that. I knew where I would catch up with whatever was left of the protest crowd: the Gethsemane Church. When I got there I found the momentum had stalled. The crowds were still in their thousands, not so much running scared as exhilarated at their moment of glory, but here, for the first time, they wavered. Some wanted to continue, but did not know where to go. The church offered a prime opportunity for someone to address the crowds; they called for speakers, but nobody came forward. In the streets they had chanted ‘New Forum’, the most broadly based of the new, still illegal, embryonic political groupings, but no spokesman appeared. A figure with a sense of occasion and minimal rhetorical ability could have moulded them to his whim, sent them where he wanted, turned them into a mob and directed them to the Central Committee buildings, to the Brandenburg Gate where the crowds from the West would gather on that fateful night just a few weeks distant yet still totally unimaginable, where they would have forced themselves before the television cameras and into the living rooms of the world. But the cameramen were still blindly intent on the official ‘birthday party’ and oblivious to the fact that the celebration was fast becoming the prelude to a wake.

  But the one thing on everyone’s mind was that their own East German government had been the first to endorse the massacre in Tiananmen Square. A few wandered into the church to be told by Berlin bishop Gottfried Forck that it was time to go home. His words were met with sour grumbles that turning the other cheek invited crucifixion. But nobody had a better idea. Except of course, the police. Their pride had been dented. They wanted revenge. An orderly dispersal would have implied those who had dared confront them had got away with it. And what would that lead to? Next thing you knew they’d be demanding the right to peaceful protest. Or free speech! They weren’t having it.

  They went for the Kessel again, driving the crowds away from the church – too much like a safe refuge – towards the relatively open space of broad Schönhauser Allee. It was only when we got to the entrance to the S-Bahn station, that a brave group of young people sat on the ground, refusing to move and began to chant ‘Volkspolizei, steh dem Volke bei’ (People’s Police, stand by the people). But by now the People’s Police weren’t standing by anyone; they had had enough of standing by: it was time to get their toys out. Water cannon drew up and police with attack dogs emerged from vans. The demonstrators got the message, and got up and ran, into a side street. On the right were high fences and railway tracks, on the left tenement blocks. Everyone knew that if the police kept pushing them, in the end they would have their backs against the Wall. Literally. We were just 300 metres from the ‘state border’. For anyone in that crowd the idea of climbing it was synonymous with instant death.

  Then, from the other end of th
e street, a line of truncheon-wielding police began to advance, the classic sandwich manoeuvre: closing the ‘kettle’. Behind them we could see empty military trucks with bars on the windows. We had a grim suspicion of what they might be for. Three young women, aged eighteen to twenty, went up to the grey line of young men their own age and pleaded: ‘What are you doing this for? We’re all in this shit together.’ And then the empty trucks began to back into the street, rear doors gaping like jaws, the advancing line of police ready to feed them. The three young women were the first victims, snatched by plainclothes Stasi thugs before they could get back to the safety of the masses. Not that it mattered. Within minutes a blanket operation had seized almost everyone in the street, myself included. ‘Warte mal!’ (‘Hang on a minute!’) I shouted, about to brandish my press card. But I shouted it in a broad Berlin accent, so they bunged me in with the rest and slammed the doors.

  There were forty of us with seats for thirty, caged in like chickens behind wire. Two armed police beyond the wire guarded the doors. The engine growled into life and bumped off over the cobblestones. We had no idea where we were heading, but no one was in a hurry to get there. A couple in a car at traffic lights looked aghast at a truckload of incarcerated fellow citizens. The boy next to me in the truck held up his fingers to the barred window in a victory sign. The woman in the Lada behind us bit her lip, looked at her husband and then made the same sign back. The police looked away, embarrassed.